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Tag Archives: Wexford

One of the things I miss about living in Dublin is the sea. In the two decades I spent there I was rarely farther than a 15 minute drive to the water.

In more recent years, living close to the northern shore of Dublin Bay, I could run to Dollymount Strand in 10 minutes (if I pushed it mind you, usually it took a little longer).

Since relocating to Portland, Oregon, last year, most of my running has been on the sleepy streets of North Portland, usually in the morning before traffic gets busy. It gets the job done, but it’s not quite the same as jogging along the surf line, out among the elements.

Neither is grinding out the kilometres on a treadmill, the other option in recent times (and the more sensible one, given Oregon’s weather this winter).

Running past roots. Pic: Clare Kleinedler

After six months of this, I’d had enough, though. And so I found myself arranging a trip with my wife to the central Oregon coast, to a small town called Pacific City. It boasts a large offshore sea stack, a huge, climbable sand dune, a famous brewery, and four miles of straight, level, sandy, beach.

And it was deserted. After months of living and working out in a city, it felt strange to be standing on sands which stretched out for four miles with nobody in sight. It may have been the time of year, or the early morning, but no-one ventured past the beach entrance (the site of the brewery’s pub – which may explain matters). And so I ran on alone, in silence.

Well, anything but silence. The roar of the ocean, whipped around by a steady north-easterly, kept me company. Once I got into the zone I was not only running in Pacific City, I was on Dollymount Strand, or Rosslare Strand, or Curracloe Beach, my favorite coastal runs back in Ireland.

Without cars, street signs, people, or a phone, one beautiful natural area is like all the others – thankfully. For 50 minutes I was out of civilization and out of time. I planned to run 5k along the beach, but I couldn’t resist pushing on.

I’ll hurt tomorrow, of course, but I’ll be back on city streets then, where – nicely lit, well paved, and without the wind and the noise – running is always a little tougher.

My Christmas rituals are few. I tend to spend December 25 in different places – in recent times Wexford or Los Angeles; this year, Portland.

One of my seasonal constants is “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”, the Dylan Thomas short story. Every Christmas morning I take 20 minutes to “plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find,” as the narrator puts it.

This year, for a change, I’ll listen to Thomas reading the story. The poet, ailing and alcoholic, made a recording of the piece in 1952. It’s a remarkable piece of audio, as Thomas, leaning on all the intonation and nuance of his Welsh accent, tells his tale of a young boy’s Christmas in a snowy, seaside village.

But while searching for the recording this week, I across the poet’s other great evocation of childhood, whose lines are probably more pertinent for a man in his late 30s, far from his childhood home (“the farm forever fled”), remembering Christmases past.

“Fern Hill” is not a seasonal poem. It’s set in a time of plenty, a period of huntsmen and herdsmen, when the grass is green and “the hay fields as high as the house”.

These years have passed, and Thomas remembers them with a mix of nostalgia and affection and fatalism. “I was young and easy under the apple boughs,” the poem famously begins, while, a few verses later, we read that “time allows / In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs / Before the children green and golden / Follow him out of grace”.

All of which seems oddly suitable for an adult’s Christmas in Oregon. Having long since strolled out of the fields of grace, I rarely run my heedless ways these days. Which is why the bittersweet reality of “Fern Hill”, and not the comforting nostalgia of “A Child’s Christmas In Wales”, is a more fitting read this year.

“Once below a time I lordly had the trees and leavesTrail with daisies and barleyDown the rivers of the windfall light.”

On the morning of April 27, 1916 John Cardiff – my grandfather – was one of a group of Irish rebels who mobilised in Enniscorthy, Co Wexford. A member of nationalist youth organisation Na Fianna Eireann, he was 13 years of age.

“The town hall was seized and used as headquarters, outposts were placed throughout the town and sporadic firing occurred. A detachment of Volunteers kept the RIC [police] barracks in Abbey Square under fire from the turret rocks across the [river] Slaney,” Volunteer Thomas Dwyer recalled.

Enniscorthy was the only urban area outside of Dublin to be seized during the Rising. From the Thursday of Easter week to the following Monday it remained under the control of rebels (commanded by Capt Robert Brennan), until the surrender order given by Rising’s commander-in-chief Padraig Pearse was confirmed.

John Cardiff didn’t leave a public record of his activity during the Rising, having died a decade before the Bureau of Military History took statements from its ageing participants, in the late 1950s.

It is known that he was one of 35 teenagers who drilled at the Irish Volunteers headquarters at Mary Street in the town in the year preceding the Rising, as a member of Na Fianna. At this time he, along with others, covertly monitored Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) movements in the town.

During the four-day Rising it’s likely he carried dispatches between units of the older Volunteers, as a number of Na Fianna members did. After the Rising he was not arrested – probably on account of his young age – and likely worked with others to collect and conceal weapons that were abandoned by the Volunteers after the surrender.

Cardiff remained active in Na Fianna in the years from 1917 onwards, as a section commander, maintaining firearms and ammunition and drilling.

Enniscorthy in the years before The Rising. Pic: NLI

It’s recorded that in 1920 he was Intelligence Officer for Na Fianna in the town, during the War of Independence. His comrade Thomas Dwyer recalls that Cardiff was the co-leader of a group of 25 who raided on a merchant’s store in Enniscorthy that year to search for arms. This was one of a number of raids for arms spearheaded by Cardiff in his role as Intelligence Officer.

But no full account of his revolutionary activities exists, to my knowledge. Like many of his generation all that exists – on the public record at least – is a number of mentions of his name in the statement of a fellow Volunteer (in this case Thomas Dwyer), and a brief account in his 1950 obituary (below).

The latter, published in the Wexford Echo, states: “As a mere boy Sean Cardiff joined the ranks of Fianna Eireann…He was a keen student of Ireland’s history and language. He rose to the rank of Adjutant of the Wexford Brigade, and only his associates fully understand how much his enthusiasm and painstaking work meant in building up the organisation”.

John Cardiff’s rebel story didn’t end in 1920. In 1921 he was arrested by the Devonshire Regiment of the British Army and was imprisoned for a period in Enniscorthy Courthouse. He joined the IRA in 1922 at the rank of assistant adjutant.

Opposing the Anglo-Irish Treaty, he took part on attacks on Free State posts in Enniscorthy during the Civil War. After a period ‘on the run’, he was arrested and imprisoned in Newbridge, Co Kildare and The Curragh. In 1923 he spent a period on hunger strike in prison.

Cardiff’s 1921 arrest effectively ended his career as a schoolteacher. On release from prison in 1923 he became a journalist, eventually basing himself in Wexford town and working for the Echo newspaper. He married and had two children. John Cardiff died in November 1950, at the age of 47.

He will be remembered, along with other participants of the Rising in Enniscorthy, at a State commemoration in the town on Easter Monday next.

Obituary of John Cardiff, Wexford Echo, November 25, 1950 (Click for larger version)

It was the dish that won the First World War. George Orwell argued that it staved off revolution in Britain the 1930s. It was one of the few offerings that escaped rationing in London’s Blitz.

Yet fish and chips arrived in Ireland by accident – it’s reputed – when Italian immigrant Giuseppe Cervi stepped off a boat in Cork around 1880, mistaking Cobh for New York. Undeterred, Cervi walked to Dublin and wound up selling fish and chips from a handcart near Trinity College – the first person in Ireland to do so.

He may have got the idea from fellow emigrants who’d passed through London, where the first fish and chip shop opened in 1860.

Despite Cervi’s ingenuity it took 70 years for the dish to become a staple in Ireland. When it did, in the early 1950s, the advent of trawler fishing had reduced the cost of fresh fresh (finding potatoes was rarely a problem). The food carts of the nineteenth century were long gone at this point, replaced by the ‘chipper’ – the canteen-like aesthetic of which has remained standard to this day.

Like most Irish people I grew up with the dish. The first time I had fish and chips they were likely bought from the long-departed Grace’s on Bride Street in Wexford (a place also renowned for that local staple, the rissole).

In the intervening years I’ve had fish and chips on the terraces at the old St Mel’s Park soccer ground in Athlone, at MacCurtain Street in Cork after a long reporter shift, on ferries to Britain for summer holidays, and after nights out in my college days in Dublin. The offering remained unremarkably unchanged. Over the years the wrapping moved from yesterday’s newspaper to a generic paper sheet – but it was still handed over, soggy with vinegar and covered in salt, in a steaming brown paper bag.

Old school

Then, about five years ago, fish and chips changed. Blame the Celtic Tiger, or April Bloomfield, or whoever designed those ludicrous small steel buckets, but fish and chips slowly started to appear on plates in restaurants. I now found myself eating it sitting down, at a table, instead of standing at the back of a packed chipper, or while dodging drunks on a street at 1am.

Gone too was the stodgy yellow flour and water batter, replaced by a lighter beer variety. The chips were now cooked twice over, a time-consuming trick that no doubt had Guiseppe Cervi turning in his grave.

Until a few weeks ago, when my father sent me a text message from Kilmore Quay, a small fishing village in the south east corner of Ireland, renowned for its seafood. ‘Come here for the fish and chips,’ he wrote, sending a picture of the meal as I remembered it – all angle-cut chips and heavy battered fish.

And so, last week, I travelled the 100 or so miles to the Saltee Chipper in Kilmore Quay. My concession to civilised dining was opting to eat at a table there, swapping the brown bag for a plate.

The haddock I had was caught and battered that morning. The steaming chips were just as fresh. Mushy peas – marrowfats ground into a thick green paste – were an added bonus. To top it off it there was a howling, rain-flinging gale outside – proper fish and chip-eating weather.

There isn’t a moral to this fishy tale. I’ll still order the gourmet fish chips when I’m in the mood, and I’ll try to convince myself it tastes better. But last week, for the umpteenth time, I left my heart in an Irish chip shop.

My first memory of Raven Point is of a summer afternoon when I was five or six.

I am walking with my family after Sunday lunch, along a pathway running through pine trees and around low, swampy ponds. The air smells like the sea, mixed with the scent of eagle fern. The sun is bright and high.

As we walk deeper into the woods a view of the North Slob – the mud flats at the entrance to Wexford Harbour – opens up through the brambles. Eventually the path gives way to the open dunes of the Point itself, an expanse of low grass, sand and an immense, wide sky, framed by the Irish Sea on one side and the town of Wexford, distant on the other.

Returning to Raven Point last weekend it was re-assuring to see the same pine trees over the path, the same heavy green water in the ponds. Amid the changes of 30 years Raven Point stands constant.

Stopping on the edge of the water, at the tip of the Point and surrounded only by sea, sand and sky, it could have been 30 or even 100 years earlier.

The view shared something of the “beauteous forms” praised by William Wordsworth as he looked upon Tintern Abbey:

Oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the dinOf towns and cities, I have owed to them,In hours of weariness, sensations sweet…

While the forms remain the people have changed. The six-year-old who came to Raven Point three decades ago lives on only in the memories of those who shared the walk that day. The years since have been full, often happy but not without sadness.

But Raven Point is not a place to re-live memories. It is not frozen in time. The Point was formed as a spit, and its sands are moving all the time – new flats, lagoons and dunes form and fade. The path across the sands is never the same twice.

Nonetheless at moments there is a connection here, in the light and the wind, to people who’ve gone – my younger self, the loved ones who walked the path and are no longer here to revisit it.

And so I was grateful to visit once more last weekend, to stand on the shore with my wife and think of another line from Wordsworth’s poem, thankful for this place, my past and my family.

If Christmas means anything it means home – a place or a sense of home.

The lucky ones will find themselves there today, at home, among friends, family or even alone.

I woke this chilly Christmas morning in one place I can call home, Wexford, the town where I was born. Lucky, I rose with a sense of peace, my wife alongside me, other family members stirring.

The feeling of home struck me so strongly that I was brought to another place, taken from the streets of Wexford to a snow-struck hill town in North Carolina.

A young man sat in a cafe there, in a poem by Charles Bukowski. There’s no mention of Christmas, or home, but the verse is suffused with peace, a feeling of contentment and acceptance, the Christmas spirit.

“…the meal was
particularly
good
and the
coffee.
the waitress was
unlike the women
he had
known.
she was unaffected,
there was a natural
humor which came
from her.
the fry cook said
crazy things.
the dishwasher,
in back,
laughed, a good
clean
pleasant
laugh.
the young man watched
the snow through the
windows.
he wanted to stay
in that cafe
forever.
the curious feeling
swam through him
that everything
was
beautiful
there,
that it would always
stay beautiful
there.”*

FOR 1,500 years this was the sight that greeted the lighthouse keeper at Hook Head in Co Wexford.

Looking east from the headland he would see serrated cliffs slip into the Celtic Sea, with the Saltee Islands in the distance.

The view greeted 5th century Irish monks, the Elizabethan lighthouse keepers of the 1600s and the men of the Commissioners of Irish Lights, who took up duties at Hook Lighthouse in the mid-19th century.

Hook Lighthouse.

It’s also a view that I’ve known since I was old enough to walk the precarious cliffs that stretch from lighthouse itself around to the nearby village of Slade.

Walking it this week, for the first time in a number of years, it was easy to see why those early monks lit warning fires on the peninsula to protect passing ships.

The knife-edged quartzite bluffs appear menacing, even on a benign July morning. The danger they pose, particularly in the all-too-prevalent fogs off the south coast, has ensured that a light has been kept at Hook Head ever since those first cliff-top fires.

This constant presence has also secured Hook the position of the world’s oldest working lighthouse – and it now attracts thousands of visitors each year. (This is not its only claim to fame. In 2011 Lonely Planet labelled the structure the world’s ‘flashiest lighthouse’.)

But unlike these visitors the lure of the area for me lies beyond the lighthouse. My family has history at Hook Head and it’s sited in this eastward view over the waters of the Celtic Sea.

‘My family has history at Hook Head.’

This area of water is where my great-grandfather, Charles Cullen, was lost in July 1924, a crewman on the stricken steamer SS Lismore.

It went down 16 miles out, capsizing when its cargo shifted. Of the 16 men aboard, just one survived.

My great-grandfather went down with the ship, leaving a wife and family behind (my grandmother was 16 at the time). No trace of him, or any of the other 14 men who were lost on July 10, 1924, was ever found. (The wreck of the Lismore, or what remains of it, was later located – lying on the seabed 35 metres down.)

Charles Cullen’s name wasn’t mentioned much when I was young; time had moved on and the tragedy has passed into the family history.

But he came to mind this week when, on a visit to Wexford, my father and I decided to take the old family trip again, joining the rental cars and day tripping families at ‘the Hook’.

Walking away from the lighthouse and along the cliffs – almost 90 years to the day that my great-grandfather was lost – I wondered if this tragedy had somehow subconsciously drawn my family and I back to the area over the years.

After all, fishermen’s lore would suggest that his spirit could still linger out over the waters at Hook Head in the presence of the sea-birds – and on the morning of our hike a single cormorant (just visible in the main picture) kept a solitary vigil on a rock.

But truth be told I doubt many of my family believe or believed such superstitions. And yet, like the monks, the lighthouse keepers and now the tourists, we still return to Hook Head.

Growing up in Ireland an outdoor dip meant a once-yearly trek to the west coast, where you’d nervously brave the 12c waters of the Atlantic Ocean for a few minutes, before retreating, shivering and chastened, back to the car.

Like the icy Atlantic though, once you’re in, you’re in. And, hopefully, availing of the health benefits of the mineral rich water.

The Japanese have been doing this for hundreds of years. I was introduced to the idea by my wife’s family and we travelled there to experience it earlier this month.

The simmering water itself is just one part of visiting an onsen though. You’re not fully dressed to attend the baths unless you’re wearing a traditional yukata robe (see above) and sporting geta on your feet.

I spent two days like this. Having a whiskey, yukata-clad, with the guys before a quick dip and then meeting up with our wives for a traditional Japanese dinner.

And keeping the onsen theme our ryokan (a local inn) served us onsen tamago, eggs slowly cooked in the hot spring water itself (35 mins in 70c water, Heston fans).

We spent a couple of eye (and pore) opening days in Kinosaki Onsen – a unique place, particularly to a gaijin like me who usually has his showers lukewarm and his boiled eggs from a saucepan.

Kinosaki Onsen is thousands of miles, physically, mentally and thermally from where I grew up. For all the differences there was one similarity though.

Whether the water’s 10c or 44c I still get in the same way – one tentative toe at the time.

What other way to greet the end of a relentless year than with relief? And also with happiness that it’s over; and with a hope that I won’t encounter another like it again.

I spent long hours in unhappy places over the past 12 months and, despite this, happy hours in others.

Today I’m thinking of the better times: my niece’s birthday party, a nightcap with my wife on the terrace underneath Sacré-Cœur Basilica, and, most of all, the warm afternoons in June spent with my mother at Johnstown Castle.

I am writing this thousands of miles from those places, remembering and looking forward. To everything there is a season and surely the next season will be better than the last.

This dripping soundtrack was the silver lining to the cloud which encroached on Wexford overnight last Saturday, signalling an end to July’s heatwave.

Lying and listening, awake in the darkness, it occurred to me how rarely I actually hear rain (though I feel it plenty).

I doubt I’m the only one.

Precipitation is a source of constant complaint in Ireland. That’s not surprising, given that parts of the country experience an average of 225 wet days a year.

But focusing on the sight and the feel of rain – neither of which is usually very pleasant – usually means that I miss the sound, the consistent, light drum of falling drops on leaves.

The calming effect of this may be simply an aural impact, the drops creating a sound which slips into sync with my brainwaves.

It could also have a much deeper psychological resonance, a link to a primitive human past where rainfall meant renewal of life, or growth, or a ‘oneness’ with the environment and seasons.

Or maybe it’s just soothing because I’m lying indoors in a dry bed.

That said the sound struck me again as I walked home from work late the following evening.

Moving along the tree-lined road leading to our apartment drops began to fall on the car- and wind-less street.

Removing my headphones I stood and listen to the symphony, moving and changing as drops fell on higher leaves, or lower ones, or the pavement.

Brian Eno, 1974.

The effect was almost musical.

The two incidents put me in mind of an observation made by composer Brian Eno.

In 1975, recovering in hospital following a car accident, the musician observed how the sound of rain contributed to the ambience of an environment like certain light or music did.

In Eno’s case he observed the effect the falling rain had when it was mingled with the low-volume record of harp music he was playing in the room.

This conclusion subsequently led him to create a number of groundbreaking ‘ambient’ records – containing music which comes very close to replicating the calming effect of rainsounds.

Strangely enough Eno didn’t use rain samples on these recordings – or none I can can hear at least.* (Other artists have incorporated the sound; most famously, perhaps, The Doors).

And I’ve yet to hear a musical simulacrum which has the same effect as the real thing.

Until I do I’ll just keep opening a window.

‘Morning on the Seine in the Rain’Claude Monet (1898)

________

*Unlike some other natural sounds. Two of my favourite recordings feature wind and fire – the wind on this Geir Jenssen Cho Oyo field recording and the fire crackling behind this Neil Young acoustic track.